With Kain’s actions, the massive influx of invading armies ceased. While all who had seen Kain’s wrath were well and truly scared of ever incurring it, they were glad that, for now at least, they were on his side. Many a soldier spent a sleepless night or restless slumber with horrible dreams of Kain one day going berserk and drowning the world in the hellfire that they had seen him unleash. Thankfully, unlike how he had been in ages long since passed, Kain was now a union of a completely monstrous villain side and a more… intelligent, ‘merciful’ and calculating villain side.

That was not to say that one side or another would not take over for periods of time when their body was under or removed from certain stimuli. But, as long as you were on Kain’s side, you had at least a 75% chance of escaping the wrathful rampages of his ‘darker side’ when said side assumed direct control. That was a three out of four chance of escaping certain death, and while you may be forced to walk away from it with a missing limb or horrible scarring, at least you get to live. Probably.

Anyways.

With the incursions dealt with, Kain finally felt like it was time to let his darling children have a go at killing scores of people with whatever means they felt comfortable using. His daughter was equipped her weird bow and quiver, which appeared to have but a single arrow in it, along with her twin curved daggers, while his son had a straight sword at his hip and a large scroll in his arms.

Despite being their parent, Kain had never actually seen his children go all out. This was mostly due to them being unable to do so, what with their teachers being valued and not at all disposable, but also due to the fact that they never had the need to. The twins had never been put through the wringer in a situation like this, so Kain had no idea how well they would perform. He did have faith that, after finally getting used to the mess that was modern warfare, they would be able to do more than gag and turn away from the violence. The last thing he needed was for his children to shut their eyes as they fought; a rookie mistake that could cost them their lives in certain battlefields.

The troops, Kain’s children and other important people exited the Dungeon where everyone was staying (aside from Kain who, until only a few hours ago, had been passed out near where he had made the portals fuck off) through another entrance and made their way to another potential battlefield where Kain and Pluton met up with them, along with the bestial ‘air cavalry’ that tagged along close behind. Kain was correct in his guesses.

The majority of those whom he saw, soldier, necromancer, civilian, cultist and general alike, all had either a newfound respect or a deep-seated fear of him. Well, making an artificial nuke out of the ground and detonating it in front of a bunch of people who had barely seen the power of an unrestricted [Fireball] spell tended to make people scared. They had not had the time to realize the power that some weapons and techniques were capable of, nor had they the history of the escalation of firepower. Hell, most of them had been scared of cannons and other siege engines, and now they saw a nuke go off, of course they would be scared shitless!

But Kain had no intention of waiting around for their fear to dissipate; there was a war to win and he wanted it over and done with! That, and he had to let his kids experience war firsthand, in all its horror and all its glory. He sent a few swarms of Fel Bats on a scouting mission, hoping to find a decently sized force for his children to crush. It would take a while until they would find anything, though, what with the sheer vastness and emptiness that surrounded them. But, while impatient, Kain felt that he had time to spare.

…

Rusk was a big place with not much in the way of sizable settlements, which made the whole process of finding something or someone to fight so much more annoying. What few settlements that there were made of wood and thatch and did not even have an earthen wall to defend them. With how empty everything seemed to be, it made Kain and the general staff wonder if they had already killed off the entire adult population of Rusk by accident. Surely the magically manifested armies had not been comprised of all of Rusk’s people, right?

Kain got his answer as to where the fuck everyone was when the irritated reports from Piotr, the formerly Living Ice-Age and now undead bringer of apocalypse-level localized blizzards, made their way to him via a very, very chilly Skeleton Mage. Piotr had stalked the caravans of people fleeing into the biggest city in the nation and found the elusive capital of the People’s Union. Formerly hidden by spells that had been forcibly canceled to allow for people to escape to the city one of the two crown jewels of Rusk, it was wide open for the taking. Moscow beckoned, showing herself to be ripe for the taking, all Kain and the Greater Darksol Empire had to do was come and seize the prize.

By Piotr’s estimation, there were so many people in Moscow that the food, housing and water situation was untenable for the government. The majority of the leadership was already packed up and was heading to Saint Piotrsburg, which Kain figured was right where Earth’s Saint Petersburg was, plus or minus a few degrees of longitude and latitude and a bit of terrain here and there. But the main target for now was the place where so many of Rusk’s people huddled and attempted to wait out the end. With the illusion magic having been forcibly dispelled so that people could arrive and not get hopelessly lost, its people hungry, homeless, thirsty and afraid and the bulk of the leadership having fled, Moscow could never be a better target.

Kain and the general staff ordered the troops to march. Moscow would fall within the month.

…

Piotr sighed as he continued to walk across the frozen landscape, the snow and ice growing higher with every second that passed. He could have easily taken Moscow, but Lord Kain had wanted that place to serve as the testing grounds for his children. He had, however, given Piotr a different, and some might say more valuable target. He was to take the city that was named after him.

Yes, Saint Piotrsburg was named such because the Luminas Church had made him a saint. As Piotr had said so long ago that the area that he was from was akin to Rusk, they named their ‘second capital’ after him. He had visited the place in the summer, when his power was at its weakest, but was ordered to never come back because, despite the summer sun beating down and having melted away all the snow just a few weeks prior, his arrival had plunged the city into the depths of the worst blizzard in living memory. It was almost humorously ironic that the city that bore his name would not even allow him to stay there even a single week, and Piotr had not forgotten that bruise to his ego.

What made it worse was that he eventually found out that the Ruskian leadership had engineered a spell that could partially counteract his power, which would have allowed him to live like a normal person during the warmer months of the year. They knew how to allow him to be normal, something he had craved like a drug until he had given up and put himself in stasis beneath a Guild Hall but had denied it to him.

He hated them for it, but what he hated them for more than that was that the same spell could be used to make the spring and summer time last longer and the fall and wintertime shorter. With such a spell, they could have avoided the institutionalized yearly famines, housing and water issues and more. Yet, rather than do this, they used the suffering of their own people to hold them down. They lacked the food needed to grow strong enough to rise up, they lacked the water needed to expand their villages, they lacked the flora needed to build better homes and defend themselves; they lacked so much and all of it could have been given to them with just a single ritual!

But, as time passed while stuck in stasis, Piotr’s rage had turned into apathy. Now that he was undead, his apathy had been twisted into something cruel. The sins of the father were not and are not the sins of the son, but if the son repeats the same sins as the father then those sins are his own as well. Even if the spell had been lost to time, the sin of not using it and/or attempting to recover it was still as grievous as the sins that had been waged by their ancestors. Now, Piotr was coming to collect on those sins. He would bring death to those that treated their own people so harshly, or at least he would do so to those not aligned with his masters.

He trudged on through the blizzard that seemed to grow in intensity as he reminisced about times long since gone. Soon enough, the city that bore his name would be reduced to ruins by his own undead hand.